More than a service trip

Alternative Spring Break encourages Rice students to think critically about advocacy

This year, Rice undergraduates traveled across the nation during Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trips designed to engage with communities and gain awareness of social justice issues.

Rice students in Edinburg, Texas paid a visit to the Boys & Girls Club of Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley. (Photo provided by Jessy Feng)

In Sacramento, Calif., one group of students worked with local environmental groups and lawmakers to understand how policy and advocacy promote access to clean water. Another group investigated the long-term effects of foster care in New York City. And here in Texas, Rice students headed south to the Rio Grande Valley to better understand the public education system from the perspective of refugee and immigrant children and the challenges faced by adults learning a new language in a new country.

“A large misconception perpetuated by the media is that there is an ‘invasion of illegal immigrants,’” said Will Rice sophomore Smeet Madhani, site co-leader of the trip along with Brown College sophomore Jessy Feng. “In reality, a large portion of this miscategorized population consists of families, parents, children and unaccompanied minors who came to the U.S. in search of political asylum. We had the chance to see this up close when we volunteered at a refugee center and met families from Central America.”

The trip Madhani and Feng designed as site leaders, “Two Is Better Than One: Exploring Bilingual Education, Its Barriers and the Link to Higher Education,” took students to Edinburg, a city an hour north of the Mexican border. There, they worked with community partners ranging from a border strategist with the American Civil Liberties Union to a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Center for Bilingual Studies and came away with an entirely new understanding of how language affects every aspect of a person’s life, from their career aspirations to their core identity.

Alternative Spring Break trips allow Rice students to engage with communities outside of their own. (Photo provided by Jessy Feng)

“For the refugees that we met, their language was a defining part of their home and culture that they could bring with them,” Madhani said. “However, over time we’ve seen the systematic loss of languages through language oppression where students were punished for speaking their native language in schools. Even today, subtractive schooling is prevalent in most schools as we push English as the primary language without much regard for the students who come from diverse backgrounds that are now at risk for losing a sense of their identity.”

Over time, Rice’s tremendously popular ASB trips (roughly half of the applicants for the 10 trips are selected each year) have shifted focus. No longer primarily oriented toward community service projects, they now challenge students to think critically about the social justice issues they’re tackling with each weeklong trip in March.

“It’s more than just a service trip,” said Morgan Kinney, the assistant director of domestic programs and partnerships at Rice’s Center for Civic Leadership (CCL), where she oversees the ASB program. “In fact, a lot of trips don’t do direct service because they’re working with populations where it’s not really ethical to be doing direct service,” such as children in foster care or incarcerated individuals. Instead, the CCL “breaks down their notions of what service is, introduces them to critical service-learning and challenges their preconceived notions when they go into a service setting,” Kinney said.

Just as students apply for the trips themselves, site leaders such as Madhani and Feng must apply for their leadership positions. If selected, leaders design the trips with input from Kinney and spend an entire fall semester in her Alternative Spring Break Leadership course planning for the following spring — including all the logistics of the trip itself. “It’s really quite a lot of work for them,” Kinney said; there’s also a research paper that must be completed over the summer, a new requirement as of 2016 that was suggested by the students themselves “so that they’re really thinking very critically about everything they’re doing and making sure they’re doing no harm.”

The trips have become refined as new site leaders are attracted to different aspects of a particular issue. “I would say at least half of the trips are usually returning to a site that they have worked with in the past but with their own take on what they want to dive into,” Kinney said. “They’re not really allowed to recreate a trip for the sake of just going on a trip.”

Rice students visited the Rio Grande Valley to better understand the public education system from the perspective of refugee and immigrant children. (Photo provided by Jessy Feng)

This year, for instance, a popular ASB trip that takes students to Washington, D.C., narrowed in scope from “reproductive rights” to “examining barriers that are particularly faced by transgender people, women with intellectual disabilities and women of color in accessing reproductive care.” Another long-running trip to Winter Park, Colo., to work with the National Sports Center for the Disabled honed in on examining the ways in which popular media create and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about various disabilities.

Last year, Kinney said, students on a trip in Highland Park, N.J., to study immigrant communities found themselves pivoting almost as soon as they arrived. “When they got there, they realized that one of their community partners was really focused on incarceration of immigrants, and so they shifted the focus this year specifically to immigrant and refugee incarceration,” Kinney said. “I’m always encouraged to see what the new spin is on each trip and what students are really passionate about.”

Madhani and Feng, who hope to take the same trip again next year, are already looking forward to seeing how their Rio Grande Valley trip transforms over time as new students step up as site leaders. “There is so much more to learn about bilingual education and how to facilitate students’ access and transition to college,” Madhani said. “While smiling, laughing and crying together, we learned that there is always room for us as students to get involved within our community — and that, more importantly, it’s needed.”

As proof of their point, Madhani and Feng welcomed some of the very same students they worked with in Edinburg to Rice last week. The high schoolers came to visit as prospective Owls, said Kinney. “It was a really awesome follow-up to the trip.”

For more information on participating in Alternative Spring Break, visit the CCL’s website at https://ccl.rice.edu/students/learn/alternative-spring-break-participant/. For more information on becoming an ASB site leader, visit https://ccl.rice.edu/students/act/alternative-spring-break-site-leader/.